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Strategy is hard enough if you understand it. It's even harder if you don't.

If you understand it, you realize it's made up of many moving parts. If you don’t, the best you’ll come up with is some version of operational efficiency: building more links, writing more blog posts, making more video. Those activities aren’t strategies — and if you fail to differentiate your plan, you’ll find yourself forever chasing those who started before you, or falling behind better-funded competitors.

I enjoy strategy, both on the academic and theoretical side of things and in more practical opportunities helping our clients at Distilled. Below are some of the things I’ve learned along the way that you might find useful, especially if you're a business owner, setting up marketing strategies, or a consultant. If you're in more of an individual contributor role, you'll receive the background and basis you need to understand how it all fits together and create a personal development plan towards building strategy.

Read on and you’ll have a better understanding of what strategy means, what type of strategy you need and how to make good decisions. For each section, I’ve included a reading list too.

What is strategy?

A good starting point for understanding strategy is an infamous article by Michael E. Porter – "What is Strategy?" It’s quite academic, but covers a lot of the key points. I recommend reading it a few times; it’s worth it.

To understand what strategy is, I like to use a chemical analogy of elements and compounds. A compound is a combination of two or more elements. In the case of a strategy, the activities would be the elements and the strategy would be the compound. I like this analogy for a few reasons:

Reverse-engineering a compound can be challenging

Many people fall into the trap of trying to copy a competitor's strategy. This is bad for a number of reasons, but one in particular that I’d like to highlight: even if you think you know what a competitor's strategy is from the outside, it can be very hard to copy successfully unless you know all of the individual details.

Much like a chemical reaction, different quantities of the same elements combined in different ways can produce very different results. Often, when people try to copy a strategy, they’re really just copying an element or activity.

Compounds are only as strong as their weakest link

Different strategies take different levels of energy to crack. In What is Strategy?, this idea is referred to as “activity systems” and “fit.” The example used is Southwest Airlines. Some people would try and describe a strategy as a slogan: “Southwest Airlines services price- and convenience-sensitive customers.” That might be true, but there’s not anything particularly advantageous about that idea. The competitive advantage comes from how they integrate:

“Through fast turnarounds at the gate of only 15 minutes, Southwest is able to keep planes flying longer hours than rivals and provide frequent departures with fewer aircraft. Southwest does not offer meals, assigned seats, interline baggage checking, or premium classes of service. Automated ticketing at the gate encourages customers to bypass travel agents, allowing Southwest to avoid their commissions. A standardized fleet of 737 aircraft boosts the efficiency of maintenance.”

This is what those individual pieces look like as part of a system:

Click to open a larger version in a new tab

The more stable the compound, the slower it reacts

A stable compound with lots of bonds, while strong and hard to copy, is slow to adapt if the market changes unexpectedly. Change forces managers to dismantle their existing resource systems and reassemble them in new strategic positions.

“For example, Liz Claiborne, an apparel company, relied on a positioning strategy in which production, distribution, marketing, design, presentation and sales resources were all tightly linked. But when the industry changed, the company’s relationships with department stores were disrupted. In an effort to adapt, Claiborne executives changed resources such as their “no reordering” process that had antagonized department stores. But since this process was synergistically entwined with other resources like overseas logistics and distant manufacturing locations, the “no reordering” process could not be undone without damaging system coherence. Financial performance sank precipitously. Only after Claiborne executives dismantled their existing resources and started reconnecting new ones did positive performance begin to return.”
– Source

All of the above is to say that the key to an effective and sustainable strategy is to focus on the integration of activities. Operational efficiency alone isn’t a strategy. A good way to sanity-check this is by asking why you're doing an activity.

I like this slide from fellow Distiller Rob Ousbey, which puts some of theory into context in marketing strategy:

What type of strategy do you need?

The type of marketing strategy you use can (and should) change as the business requirements change. Two questions that are a good place to start:

How predictable is your market?

How malleable is the market (can you influence demand, needs, etc.)?

Based on your answers to those questions, there are choices. I like the wording from “Which Strategy When?”:

Position (fortress) – Positional-based strategies are best when you're trying to defend a long-term position in the market. Strategies in this space involve deepening the activities and resources that you have within a particular area. This is best in markets where there isn’t a lot of change.

Leveraging strategy – Leveraging strategies are useful in markets where you have some influence on how the market moves and there's less predictability. A chess analogy is a good one, since it’s not just about having the right pieces; it also requires making smart moves. A recent example that I love is the example of Google using Deepmind AI to reduce data center costs by 15%. That’s a pretty big deal.

Opportunity (surfing) – Opportunity strategies can be compared to surfing and waves; it’s hard to predict when they'll come or how long they'll last. Timing is important, and occasionally you get a good one. Being set up in a way that allows you to capitalize on opportunities as they arise is crucial.

It’s possible, probably recommended, to have some mix of all three. I like the graph that our R&D team use to explain this, shown below. The idea is that there are always trade-offs between the chance of success and reward.

One of the hardest things about strategy? Resisting the urge to do it all. The most obvious way this happens is by getting distracted by competitors. In the book The Secrets of Consulting, the first chapter introduces the idea of the law of strawberry jam: "the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets,” which is a nice way of saying that you can’t do it all. Every service or feature you add to your business has a cost of some kind. Trade-offs are a critical part of making sure your strategy is sustainable, because they protect from competitors trying to straddle multiple markets.

To go back to the previous example of Southwest Airlines, someone that tried to spread it far and thick was Continental Lite. By trying to copy Southwest and offer a low-cost airline solution while still trying to compete as a full-service airline:

“The airline dubbed the new service Continental Lite. It eliminated meals and first-class service, increased departure frequency, lowered fares, and shortened turnaround time at the gate. Because Continental remained a full-service airline on other routes, it continued to use travel agents and its mixed fleet of planes and to provide baggage checking and seat assignments.”
Source: What is Strategy?

If you haven’t made some trade-offs, your position probably isn’t sustainable and is open to imitation.

“Trade-offs ultimately grounded Continental Lite. The airline lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the CEO lost his job. Its planes were delayed leaving congested hub cities or slowed at the gate by baggage transfers. Late flights and cancellations generated a thousand complaints a day. Continental Lite could not afford to compete on price and still pay standard travel-agent commissions, but neither could it do without agents for its full-service business. The airline compromised by cutting commissions for all Continental flights across the board. Similarly, it could not afford to offer the same frequent-flier benefits to travelers paying the much lower ticket prices for Lite service. It compromised again by lowering the rewards of Continental’s entire frequent-flier program. The results: angry travel agents and full-service customers.”
Source: What is Strategy?

Other academic theories as to why copying competitors is a bad idea are covered in the Innovator's Dilemma, which I also recommend reading.

The short version is that when competitors copy each other, the only person that wins is the customer. Over the long term, the more competitors converge, the more they look like each other and customers default to price to help choose between options. This drives prices down and squeezes margins.

To draw comparisons to the search space, I see this taking place in processes like keyword research. So many companies make a big list of keywords, then churn out average content that looks the same as every other article online about that topic. Don’t waste your time.

Advice for choosing a digital marketing strategy

Don’t turn it into an optimization problem. There's more than one right answer in the majority of cases. I like the advice Scott McNealy gives (he was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years). When asked how he makes decisions, he said:

“It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about 'making the right decision' and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right.”Source

What an amazing attitude! You can see how this applies at the later stage in strategy. Once you’ve gone through all of the possible scenarios, validated the ideas, and narrowed it down to the last couple, this is the stage where analysis paralysis takes effect and people naturally want to turn strategy into planning. Just pick one and focus on making sure it turns out a success. Another way to think about this: strategy is about placing bets and shortening odds of success. Remember that you can course-correct; strategy isn’t sniping. You can take more than one shot and iterate, so don’t be afraid to change.

With that in mind, I’ll wrap it up. Hopefully this was useful to some people. For a deeper dive into this, take a look at my SearchLove presentation, Creating Your Digital Strategy, which covers all of the above and in a more practical, process-driven way.

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What's more important: drawing in more traffic, or converting the traffic you have? When it comes to your landing pages, that may be a tough question to answer. After watching today's Whiteboard Friday, you'll be better equipped to decide whether your site should opt for an SEO focus, a conversion focus, or a strategic balance of both.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

So a few weeks back, I was at Unbounce's CTA Conference up in Vancouver, Canada, which was an amazing event, one of the best conferences that's put on in our industry, in my opinion. I got a question from a few folks there about how to decide whether to target a landing page toward SEO, toward conversion rate optimization and conversion-focused, or whether we could combine those. So I thought we'd chat a little bit about that today. It is quite doable.

An SEO-focused landing page has a few features that are unique from a conversion-focused landing page. In fact, both of them are unique. So what I'm going to do is use the example of Little Hotelier. Little Hotelier offers reservation software, front desk software for small hotels, B2Bs, guesthouses. I thought we could imagine basically a resource page on their website that was really a landing page that's focused on SEO around a hotel booking site database. So, of course, one of the things you have to do if you're a small hotel, or a B2B, or a guesthouse is you've got to get listed on hundreds if not thousands of different listing sites — Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Kayak, etc., etc., all the way down the list, down to the very local-focused ones or regional-focused ones.

Managing all those listings is a real pain. So is managing the front desk and the bookings and making sure that everything is convenient. So Little Hotelier manages all this for us and has a resource page. It's not quite as good as the one I'm going to describe here. But let's just imagine for a sec that they have this list of all the hotel booking sites, a database of it with all the information you might want. Then, of course, they have their conversion-focused page, littlehotelier.com, their homepage, which is really all-in-one business software for B&Bs, and guesthouses and small hotels. This is very conversion-focused. They're trying directly to get people to buy the product.

This page is much more resource-focused. They're trying to get people to see, "Hey, here are all of those sites that, well, of course, Little Hotelier can help list you on and manage for you, but also here's just generic and general information about them." I think it'd be awesome if they listed all of these sites and included things like traffic and the number of bookings that they saw from those sites in 2015, the requirements to get listed, and the submission page. Then they could have a CTA, a call to action like, "Let Little Hotelier manage hotel bookings for your property."

This would work really as an SEO-focused landing page. It's designed to draw traffic in, to drive keywords like "list of hotel booking sites," "where to submit my small hotel," "most visited hotel booking sites." You could even make regional-focused ones of this, like "hotel listing sites New Zealand" if they wanted to have a New Zealand-focused set of sites where you could submit or manage yourself in the booking world. This one is really much more targeted, hypertargeted, only focused on the keywords that are going to convert people directly, like "small hotel software" or "B&B hotel reservation software," that kind of stuff.

The differences and identifying your needs

The differences between these two and the way to identify whether you need one or the other or need a mix of them is to ask a few questions. First off:

Are you trying to rank for generic keywords or conversion-focused keywords?

Are you trying to rank for both?

Are you not worried about keyword rankings at all and you're only concerned with conversion?

If you're only concerned with conversion, then you want this one. But if you are worried about both ranking for keywords and trying to convert some visitors, you probably want a more content-focused page like this one, a more SEO-focused landing page.

Bounce rate and engagement rate

One of the needs that you have with SEO is that you need low bounce rate and high engagement rate. But the reverse is true here. You don't necessarily need to worry about bounce rate, engagement rate, you only need to worry about conversion rate.

SEO-focused: So this needs a low bounce rate and a high click-through rate. You want people staying on this page, you want them to click the call to action, and you want them to investigate more.

Conversion-focused: But on this page, actually a high bounce rate is okay if the conversion rate is high. So if people are converting from this page, it doesn't matter too much if a lot of people visit and many of them go away from here. That's not too important to you. You're just worried about conversion rate and optimizing for that conversion rate. If you can bring that up a percent, you don't mind if bounce rate also goes up 5% or 6% or 7% because you're turning people off who are the wrong customers.

Keyword targeting

SEO-focused: Here, you've got to have keyword-targeted content. That means the content itself needs to fulfill all the requirements that Google has and that visitors have around what they're looking for.

Conversion-focused: This, keyword targeting is secondary or might even be unnecessary entirely.

Editorial links

SEO-focused: This needs to be able to earn editorial links or it can't rank. If it can't earn editorial links, it's going to have a very, very difficult time with manual link building to a conversion-focused page. Commercially-focused pages are much tougher.

Conversion-focused: But this one doesn't even need to worry about links at all.

Audience

SEO-focused: This one has to serve many audiences. It's treated really like a piece of content that helps anyone who's looking for this information and then has a CTA, a call to action on the page.

Conversion-focused: But this one needs to be heavily focused on one particular audience, the particular audience Little Hotelier is trying to convert who's the right customer for them, for their software. Hopefully, those folks are already qualified.

SEO-focused: These folks over here are not necessarily qualified. This might be part of the qualification process. If you visit this page and you then say, "Huh, I'm kind of interested in letting them manage my bookings," maybe you should end up here, on this landing page that is conversion-focused.

Traffic

SEO-focused: This page should be driving traffic to those more conversion rate-focused pages.

Conversion-focused: This page, yes, it might rank for some keywords, but it's primarily concerned with direct conversions, and hopefully it's receiving traffic from other onsite channels, like this one, or offsite paid channels that are driving very targeted visitors.

What I'd urge you to do is ask yourself these questions when you're considering a landing page. Am I trying to earn traffic that might be interested in my content? If so, you're building one of these (SEO-focused). If you're trying to target an audience that is already qualified, that's already familiar with you, or that you're trying to get familiar with your product, then you're really trying to convert them, in which case you want one of these (conversion-focused).

Conversion-focused: These pages are great for doing tons of landing page testing and optimization. They're great for videos. They're great for testimonials.

SEO-focused: These types of pages are great for content. They're great for serving all sorts of visitor intense. They're great for targeting a large set of keywords that all have the same searcher intent.

When you try and mix these, things get a little challenging. That's where you really need to balance out and decide: "Hey, what is my primary goal here? Serve the searcher audience, which may not be conversion-focused, or convert people and not worry so much about the searcher audience. Maybe try to capture them on other pages before they get here."

All right, everyone, look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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When it comes to brick-and-mortar storefronts, local businesses often struggle to compete with neighboring big brands. Statistics show that, even for a well-known local store that's established a strong relationship with its customers and built a community through the years, having such a neighbor can be detrimental. But what about a newly opened business? Does it have any chance of competing with popular brands? My experience has led me to believe there's only one way a locally owned business can overcome big competition: it needs to take advantage of local SEO.

Recently, in collaboration with Accuranker, I conducted a survey that touches upon the difficulties local businesses face when trying to become visible in Google’s local results. We analyzed more than 300,000 local SERPs across multiple industries (beauty, medical services, auto services, legal, shopping, etc.) to get a clear understanding of what the chances are for a local site to seem attractive to Google.

One of the more curious insights our research revealed is that the legal services niche is among the most competitive. Sure, this finding isn't rocket science. In fact, I bet on some level you were aware of this (or at least you had a gut feeling). However, this issue is much more complex than it seems. The legal services niche far surpasses other niches in terms of competition and prices.

Does this mean that the legal services niche falls under radically different rules and requires unique SEO tactics? This is exactly the question I set out to answer, and you’re most welcome to follow me on my little investigation!

Gathering the data for this article

After reading this article, you’ll understand the biggest challenges that any legal website faces when trying to become visible in the SERPs. The data here will help ensure that your future strategies are based on informed decisions. Moreover, you’ll be able to streamline your creative process and find non-standard approaches that will cement your success in the legal industry.

To conduct proper research on what SEO strategies local businesses employ in the legal services niche, I took the following steps:

I made a list of keywords unrelated to any brand (which could hardly be classified as local).

I identified the most competitive places in the US for this industry in order to analyze how legal sites build a presence in this extremely aggressive environment

The first step was simply to do keyword research, which involved a bit more manual work than usual — I tried my best to filter out branded keywords and ones that weren’t relevant to local searches.

With the help of Statista I was able to get a list of the states in America that have the highest employment rates in the legal niche:

This graph shows US states with the highest number of employees in legal occupations in the United States as of May 2014. Source: statista.com

You can see that California, New York, and Florida have the highest number of employees in this industry, hence these locations are the most "densely populated" by law firms and lawyers, and, as a result, the competition in these states should be higher than in other states. After I made a list of the most competitive locations, I was ready to move on to the next step — analyzing the domains that appear in SERPs for the keywords I had previously selected.

Now let's see what my findings revealed.

The top 5 SEO challenges for the legal niche

The extreme competitiveness of the legal services niche might be explained by the fact that this market generates more than $248 billion USD in revenue (according to a recent report provided by Statista) with only a relatively small number of searches.

To give you a better understanding of the size of the legal services industry in the US, let’s compare it with a bigger market: for instance, if we look at ecommerce, we can clearly see that the revenues generated by the two niches in question are nearly the same (ecommerce sales surpass $256 billion USD), despite the fact that ecommerce traffic share figures are four times greater than in legal services. It’s safe to say that the legal niche has turned out to be a ridiculously competitive market, because it's an outrageously profitable one. I’m also certain that the success of any SEO activity depends on a deep understanding of how the industry and its major players work.

In the next section, you’ll learn about the main challenges that legal businesses face.

#1. Online legal business are dominating local SERPs

Statistics from an IbisWorld report confirm that the online legal services niche was able to generate $4 billion USD in 2015. Moreover, in recent years this niche has been steadily expanding due to the fact that consumers are interested in getting legal services online. That’s why it doesn’t come as a surprise that a company named Rocket Lawyer generates more than 30,000 searches monthly (according to Google Keyword Planner) by helping users deal with their legal issues online. This number of searches proves that online legal services are gradually becoming popular, and people don’t want to spend their time scheduling an appointment with a lawyer anymore.

Now you’re probably wondering how this trend is affecting local SEO, right?

Knowing that New York, Miami, and Los Angeles are among the most competitive locations for the legal niche, I decided to find out which sites are the most visible in local search results there. I took into account more than 500 different keywords related to legal services and compiled a list of the domains that most appeared most frequently for those keywords. And here are the top three domains that remain visible in local search results in all three cities:

Findlaw.com

Avvo.com

Lawyers.com

After making this list, I double-checked these websites to make sure that all of them belong to the online legal services niche. I also decided to dig deeper and manually checked the top twenty domains that were most visible across all the locations I analyzed, in order to understand what kind of legal services they provide. I found out that 55.6 percent of the sites I analyzed belong to the online legal services niche. That means that local businesses now have to compete not only with global businesses, but also with online legal businesses that, by default, have better positions in SERPs, as the main goal of their business is to increase their online presence by getting more organic traffic from Google.

Apart from the strong presence of online businesses in local organic SERPs, I was struck with the steady visibility of the top twenty websites that appear in local search results in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. The shocking truth I discovered about Google local SERPs is that less than 20 percent of sites were unique across all the studied locations. This means that search results are occupied by global and online businesses in 80 percent of cases. Furthermore, the top three most visible domains remain the same in all three cities, and they are as follows:

Findlaw.com,

Avvo.com, and

Lawyers.com.

I also discovered that all three of these websites belong to the online legal services niche, and, despite SEO visibility, have a good number of backlinks. I am of the opinion that local businesses have no chance of competing with them whatsoever.

As I studied the 20 percent of websites that are unique, two curious cases of locally based businesses caught my eye — Injurylawyers.com and Cellinoandbarnes.com. Let’s take a closer look at these two websites.

From Injurylawyers.com’s “Contact” page, I learned that it operates mostly in Florida. However, I don’t think that the reason it ranks so highly in local search results in Miami is because of its physical presence there. Even at a quick glance, it becomes clear that Injurylawayers.com is ranking so high in local results because of its website’s overall performance. As you can see from the screenshot below, its website has a good number of referring domains, as well as a decent amount of organic traffic:

Another site that caught my attention — Cellinoandbarnes.com — has a branch based in New York. The history of this legal company begins over 50 years ago, and without any doubt Cellino and Barnes is a well-known and trusted bran. Plus, Google recognizes it as a brand. The very fact that its brand name is being searched for more than 6,000 times a month speaks volumes about the trustworthiness of this legal company:

All these facts show that Cellinoandbarnes.com’s visibility in New York SERPs is because of the domain’s general performance in Google US organic search results:

My quick research proves that, in practice, Google doesn’t give priority to NY-based legal companies and still mostly relies on general ranking factors. And it seems obvious now that any online business can easily outperform an offline SMB legal company by increasing the number of backlinks, brand mentions, and site visits it receives.

#3. The local pack is still a saving grace for local businesses

One year ago, Google implemented a major change that dramatically minimized local businesses’ chances of becoming visible in local packs: Google replaced the 7-pack in SERPs with a 3-pack. And I was quite interested to figure out what kinds of businesses now hold these three positions in the legal niche, and whether these results are local.

Despite the fact that local organic SERPs are fully occupied by big online businesses, the local pack still is the best way to remain present in Google for locally based legal companies. My research revealed that 67 percent of sites that appear in local packs for legal services are hyper-local and local. To arrive at this percentage, I analyzed the domains that appear in local packs in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles in terms of their SEO performance in Google US (to do this, I used Serpstat’s Batch analysis tool).

I was also curious what share of online presence the local legal businesses that appeared in the local pack had, along with the breakdown by states. To mark sites as local, I checked their their traffic with the help of the Serpstat's Batch Analysis Tool. (I'd like to note that I find Serpstat’s figures most relevant for such purposes, as they parse raw data from Google US. You can easily spot which sites are global and which are local.) And here’s what I found:

Miami – 60% of legal websites appear in the local pack

Los Angeles – 35% of legal websites appear in the local pack

New York – 15% of legal websites appear in the local pack

This was quite an insight, since I assumed that California would be the most competitive location for the legal niche, because — as you may recall from the beginning of this post — it's the state most densely populated by law firms. Also, it’s surprising to find New York only at third place in this list. Yet, as you can see, Miami has the greatest number of local sites that are present in local pack. Therefore, I believe that being featured in local search results in New York requires a lot more resources than it does to achieve the same visibility in Miami. And this is something that every SEO expert should be aware of.

#4. You can’t stand out without a site — even in local pack results

It’s a well-known fact that Google’s local pack provides businesses with the opportunity to appear at the top of Google SERPs even without a website. According to my previous research, which I conducted in collaboration with the AccuRanker team, the local pack works much better for less competitive niches. What I tried to clarify here is whether you can stand out in a local pack without a website in such an unconventional and competitive niche as legal services. Unfortunately, no, you cannot.

To prove this, I analyzed 986 local SERPs in order to figure out if legal brands can appear with or without a website. My findings showed that 86 percent of legal businesses that pop up in local packs have a website. This means that even if your business is visible in local packs without a website, in a majority of cases, it’ll be considered by potential clients as less trustworthy, since users usually expect to see a link to a particular domain.

Without a link to a professional-looking website, your business will seem less credible — not only to potential clients, but also to Google. Nevertheless, it’s not unusual for large, global companies to be trusted more than small, local ones. Therefore, small companies need to instill confidence in their potential clients by having a website.

#5. There’s no correlation between a legal website’s ranking number one in a local pack and its number of reviews

I’m certain that every business owner understands the importance of customer reviews. It’s a no-brainer that a level of trust is instantly established when a potential client sees that a local business has reviews. And it definitely increases the likelihood of said client to convert. Also, the very presence of Google native reviews is thought to be among the Top 50 local search ranking factors.

However, this study of legal services has already revealed that there are quite a few peculiar ranking factors that business owners need to keep in mind in order to succeed in this niche. That’s why I was curious to know whether there’s any correlation between a site’s number of customer reviews and its ranking #1 in a local pack.

With the help of the AccuRanker team I was able to get the sum of reviews that show beside each result in local pack. Afterwards, I analyzed more than 2,000 local SERPs in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. And here’s what I found:

There’s no correlation between ranking in the first position in a local pack and your number of reviews.

For instance, in New York local pack results, the companies that appear in the third position have 824 total reviews. Those that appear in the first – 732. Moreover, I noticed a good number of cases in which a company that had a solid number of reviews was ranked in the third position, while a business that hadn’t even been reviewed yet was ranked in the first.

Another striking insight I gained: most legal sites never show their potential visitors more than 2 reviews. Based on this data, I can say that this represents an overall industry trend of a lack of native Google reviews. That’s why Google ranks businesses that haven’t been reviewed so highly. Even if you have a significant number of customer reviews, it won’t help your business rank higher in local pack results.

One final note

Without any doubt, the legal niche presents a lot of unique local SEO challenges that other industries hardly ever face. The high penetration of online legal services into the existing legal market is changing the current business landscape — in particular, it's drastically affecting local results. Online legal businesses are stealing an outrageous amount of web traffic from local companies, without giving them even a slim chance of ranking as well in local SERPs.

Fortunately, local legal businesses still have priority in local packs, but the highly competitive environment is forcing them to improve their online presence by creating a website. Since a majority of the companies that appear in local packs have sites, your potential clients’ expectations are ratcheting up. In fact, this trend may reinforce searchers' opinions that businesses without a website are untrustworthy. Furthermore, it seems that Google also prefers to show users local legal businesses that have a site, rather than those that don’t. The only good news is that your number of reviews doesn’t really influence your rankings in local packs.

Still, if a local legal business is interested in attracting clients via the Internet, it shouldn’t hesitate to look for alternative ways of generating traffic in both organic and paid search channels.

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Your Google local profile description field can now only be edited on Google+. You can no longer update it on Google My Business. The post Google My Business drops ability to edit business description field appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Siri commands, AMP errors & mobile search up appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Are you ready for AMP? Ready or not, it's coming to the Google search results, and it's arriving in a big way. Google has announced that they'll be showing Accelerated Mobile Pages in their search results for the “ten blue links.” This means that sites that aren’t news-specific now have the opportunity to show AMP pages in Google’s search results.

AMP is a very lightweight version of a webpage that has been stripped down of the many elements that cause a regular webpage to display slowly, such as tons of cookies, multiple third-party Javascript, and slow loading ad networks. This results in a page that loads lightning-fast, which is great for those who are on slower connections or simply don't want to wait for a regular heavier page to load.

AMP has had a fairly positive reception both from site owners and from users. It's much faster and more streamlined for searchers, especially on mobile devices that tend to be a little bit slower connection-wise.

Not a ranking boost

It is important to note that AMP in the mobile search results do not get any additional ranking boost. Google currently has the mobile-friendly ranking boost, and because AMP pages are mobile-friendly, they receive the same ranking boost.

However, there isn't an additional incentivized reason to use AMP strictly for ranking purposes. Don’t switch everything to AMP simply because you think you’ll get an additional ranking boost to help you beat out competitors.

There are indirect ranking benefits, though. For example, if searchers seek out AMP results, some sites could see higher clickthrough rates on their AMP pages. And as consumer awareness grows about AMP, that will likely rise.

Replacing mobile results

Google isn't showing additional search results based on AMP specifically. Sites with AMP won’t show two versions of the same page in the search results, one mobile and one AMP. Rather, if any of the pages in the SERPs have an AMP version, Google will show that instead of the mobile or desktop page that would normally appear.

Just as a mobile-friendly page has a tag at the front of the description snippet showing that it's mobile-friendly, AMP has the same thing. For AMP, those results are tagged with AMP and an encircled lightning bolt before the description.

Will you be penalized for not displaying AMP?

No, Google is not planning to penalize a site simply because it isn’t AMP. Your site will still have the same positioning in mobile search results as the mobile version of the page.

Google will simply replace the mobile-friendly page — or the desktop page, if a mobile-specific page isn't available — and show the AMP version of the page.

For sites that don't have an AMP version of their page in the SERPs, Google will opt to show the mobile-friendly page first, or the desktop page if there's no mobile-friendly version. But sites that are AMP-less will not be demoted in any way.

Do other ranking factors apply to AMP?

There's no reason to believe that some of the regular ranking factors wouldn’t apply to AMP pages, especially for those websites that are currently AMP-only. However, because of the nature of AMP, they likely wouldn’t be a concern.

This will include things like page speed. Because AMP pages are significantly faster than mobile pages, there’s no reason for a site owner to worry that they could be negatively impacted in rankings because of slow page speed.

Likewise, with the above-the-fold algorithm that targets sites with significant ads above the content, this again isn’t cause for concern as most AMP pages are “ad-light.”

But it is important to remember that while Google is crawling the mobile version and AMP version of pages, rankings are based on the desktop page. Thus, faults with the desktop page — such as slow page speed — could impact the overall performance of your AMP page positioning.

Should sites ditch their mobile version for AMP?

This question is going to become a bit more interesting as this rolls out to the 10 blue links. There are sites that are currently only available in AMP, such as the AMP Project website itself. But with Google now showing the AMP version in place of the mobile version, should site owners be concerned about having a mobile site?

Well, as of now, this is a Google AMP initiative. Other search engines haven’t announced the use of AMP in their own search results. First you'll need to consider whether other search engines have issues with sites that are AMP-only — for reference, Bing has no problems indexing AMP-only sites.

Another consideration is that AMP pages are definitely more bare-bones than your typical mobile page. You need to look at it from a user-experience point of view. Are there elements on a page that will negatively impact your customer's experience if they're not displayed on AMP?

Also, look at it from a resource perspective. For sites that maintain a separate m.site already, maintaining three versions of the page could be impactful from a resource and work hours perspective. This won’t be as much of a concern for those using responsive design, since changes made to desktop automatically get rolled out to the mobile version.

Will users gravitate to AMP results?

Just as many searchers gravitate towards search results that are tagged "mobile-friendly," it's very likely that some searchers, especially those on slower connections or those concerned about their data usage, will gravitate to those results that are in AMP format.

Also, because AMP pages tend to be less ad-heavy when compared to their mobile counterparts, some prefer AMP for this reason alone.

How popular is AMP?

At Google I/O, Google revealed that it has more than 150 million AMP documents indexed in their search results. And those documents are coming from 650,000 domains.

Many new sites are coming on board with AMP daily, and many large sites have added AMP pages to their entire website.

Is it country-specific?

Google is still rolling out AMP in the news carousel internationally. When AMP rolls out in the "ten blue links," it will be an international launch. So even if your country isn't currently showing AMP in the news section of the search results, AMP will show in the main search results when this goes live.

Is it live now?

No, this isn’t pushed live in the SERPs right now. Google has not said precisely when this will happen, other than they'll be making “this feature more broadly available later this year.”

Google notes that they've delayed this launch to allow sites time to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages before it goes live for all results. Because of AMP being so new and due to the learning curve involved, pre-announcing the change is particularly welcome in this case.

Ecommerce sites

Ecommerce sites can effectively implement AMP, and many have successfully done so in preparation for the suspected launch. But with no specific timeline for when it’s going live, there's a good chance this could go live in time for the upcoming holiday shopping season.

At the very least, ecommerce sites should make sure their content pages are AMP-ready. It doesn’t seem as though the various shopping carts have made their software or plug-ins AMP-friendly yet. But I expect that, on the heels of Google's announcement, they're scrambling to make their carts (or at the very least the product pages created through the cart software) AMP-friendly.

How to view AMP in search results

Google is only showing this to searchers who search through the Google AMP Demo URL, which can be accessed at g.co/ampdemo.

The demo shows how Google currently plans to display AMP in the search results, although Google could change the appearance before the official launch goes live in the SERPs.

Tracking AMP analytics

For those who have yet to set it up, Google does include information about AMP in their search analytics. You can drill down and see the specific keywords, positioning, clicks, and more just for AMP alone.

To find it, login to Search Console, click on Search Traffic, then Search Analytics. Underneath “Search Appearance” you can select “AMP.” Now you can drill down into AMP by pages, queries, etc. to learn more about how your AMP pages are seen and performing in search.

Setting up AMP

For those that are using a popular CMS such as WordPress or Joomla, there are already plug-ins to convert pages into AMP format. This makes it very easy for websites to make their websites AMP-enabled for searchers looking for AMP specifically.

Baby-step your way into AMP

You don't have to implement AMP across the entire site at once. You can choose to test it out on a few pages first, or convert sections at a time so the errors are less daunting. Then those errors would also be cleaned up as you roll out the next section of the site to AMP.

AMP errors

It can take up to a week or so for AMPs to show up in Google Search Console, so it's important that you go back and check which AMP errors show up on your site. There are some common errors, usually related to markup used in themes or missing logos, but Google’s help documents are fairly intuitive.

Google shows AMP errors on a per-page basis in their Google Search Console error reporting. And until these errors are fixed, those particular pages will not show AMP in the search results. The pages that are error-free will show. Site owners can correct the most widespread or significant errors first, then tackle the individual pages with errors.

AMP errors also show up on individual pages for specific elements on the page, such as where you might have embedded video or other elements that are not AMP-friendly.

You can find AMP errors, along with the number of indexed AMP pages, in the AMP section (within the Search Appearance section) of Google Search Console.

Social sharing & AMP

One of the newer features that Google has added to AMP is the ability to include share buttons for various social media platforms. Some site owners were reluctant to lose the potential for shares, since many sites derive a significant portion of their traffic this way.

The <AMP-SOCIAL-SHARE> tag doesn't yet support all social media platforms, but it supports the most popular ones (such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+).

Checking for AMP validation

There's a great extension for Chrome that will show you if an AMP validates properly, as well as show you any webpage that has an AMP version available. This is pretty handy if you need to do any competitive research and wish to learn more about the pages or types of pages that your competitors have AMP enabled for.

The lightning bolt will appear green for a page that is AMP, and it will show blue with a link to tell you that an AMP version of the page is available. Just click it to view the page as AMP instead.

This extension also enables you to view the page from a desktop computer. Right now, the Google AMP demo requires you to use it from a mobile device, which isn't ideal for those looking at AMP from a site-owner perspective.

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At Tech World last month, our team showed off some of the latest Tango-enabled games. One crowd favorite was Domino World by Schell Games which will will be available on the first Tango-enabled device, Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro, coming this fall. Schell Games has adapted a few classic games, including Jenga, into smartphone augmented reality, and their developers share their experience and considerations they kept in mind as they gave dominoes a new twist.

Google: How did your team first hear about Tango technology?

Schell Games:The Tango team invited us to their Game Developer Workshopwhere we learned about Tango and the types of apps we could develop for this platform.

Google: You took a classic game, and added AR elements. How did you come to dominoes?

Schell Games:At the Game Developer Workshop, we prototyped three games: a racing game, Jenga and a pet game. Of the three games, people connected the most with Jenga.

People loved sharing a device to play the game together—and they loved that they didn’t have to pick up all the Jenga pieces when the game was over! And from a developer perspective, Jenga was great as it highlighted Tango’s ability to recognize surfaces.

Based on how much people liked Jenga, we decided that Domino World would be our second game. Domino World gives players all the fun of dominoes, but without the setup effort or mess. We were inspired by YouTube videos where people of all ages were doing really creative things with dominoes. Our goal was to bring that experience to the phone as an immersive and fun augmented-reality experience.

Google: Which Tango features did you use in Jenga and Domino World?

Schell Games: We used motion tracking, which lets people walk around their dominoes or Jenga tower. We also used surface detection with the depth camera, so that the device recognizes when objects are placed on a surface.

Schell Games: With Domino World, for example, our approach to augmented reality thrives on reinforcing the feeling that the player’s display is a “window on the world.” Toys and dominoes are (virtually) placed on the actual surfaces around the player, and the game’s controls aid players in manipulating objects in the space in front of them. As a result, the player is naturally encouraged move around as they view, adjust and otherwise shape their ever-growing creations.

In contrast, traditional touchscreen controls largely work with metaphors of interacting with the screen’s image itself -- drawing on it, pinch-zooming it, etc. As a result, a more traditional touchscreen-controlled Domino World could have influenced players to remain more static and work with the existing view, as opposed to moving around to different vantage points.

Google: We noticed that you use a landscape orientation for Domino World. How did you decide to take that approach.

Schell Games: The decision to use landscape orientation for Domino World is the result of multiple smaller reasons all put together:

Many new players have a tendency to initially build wider versus deeper (possibly due to an instinctive desire to be able to more easily access their domino runs).

UI controls at the edges of a landscape layout minimizes HUD overlap when working with wider versus. deeper runs.

A landscape orientation naturally places players’ a hands at the device’s corners, which makes for a more stable grip during gameplay.

Google: What surprised you the most while building with Tango?

Schell Games: We were quite surprised at how easy it was to build with the Tango SDK and add Tango functionality to our apps. We used the Unity Engine which made the whole process quite seamless. It took us just over two weeks to build Jenga and 10 weeks to build Domino World from beginning to end.

Google: How do you think Tango will change the way people play games?

Schell Games:Tango makes it easy to play AR games. You don’t need to print and cut out AR trackers or markers to place throughout your room to help orient the phone. Instead, your phone always knows where it is in relation to the AR objects and you can easily start playing—whether you’re in a living room or on a bus. It’s incredible to have this experience with just your mobile device.

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